Beyond Philosophy

JANUARY 9, 2017

The customers have spoken, and they’ve had enough of car dealerships. They’re spending less time talking to salespeople at car lots and more time researching cars online, taking virtual test drives and emailing or texting dealers to find the perfect vehicle. Customers might still visit a dealership or two for a test drive, but they also might just buy the car sight unseen and have it delivered, according to dealers and industry executives who gathered recently for the Tampa International Auto Sh

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ShepHyken

JANUARY 11, 2017

A few weeks ago I had breakfast at one of my favorite places, First Watch. On that particular day I wasn’t that hungry so I ordered just one pancake. Typically, when I add a pancake they charge a dollar. When the server left the check on the table I noticed they charged me five dollars for the pancake. I asked about the high-priced pancake and learned there was as difference between adding a pancake and ordering just one for breakfast.

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Contact Center Pipeline

JANUARY 12, 2017

It’s the start of a brand-new year with new budgets, plans, outlooks and predictions. What’s in store for contact centers in 2017? We asked 17 industry experts to share their thoughts on what to keep an eye on in the next 12 months in various areas of interest to contact center professionals. Part 1 of […].

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Peter Lavers

JANUARY 10, 2017

We’re pleased to announce that Peter Lavers will attend the IBM Amplify 2017 conference in Las Vegas in March in his role as a Watson Commerce Futurist. IBM Amplify is the premier Marketing and Commerce conference, featuring practical guidance on how to understand, target, engage and win customers across multiple channels by combining proven best practices with emerging technologies.

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Reports of the death of in-store shopping have been greatly exaggerated. This year’s retail survey found that more than 60 percent of consumers start and end their journey by visiting a store. Retail customers value price above everything, but the importance of other factors varies for different brands. In-store shopping is valued highly by grocery and home improvement customers Technology retail customers place less importance on in-store experiences – for them it only ranks sixth Digital exper

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Beyond Philosophy

JANUARY 11, 2017

Back in November, Hertz rental car shares fell sharply when the huge rental car company slashed its profit forecast for the year. Hertz (which also owns Dollar and Thrifty) blamed it on vehicle depreciation, but depreciation may be the least of the rental car industry’s worries as we move into 2017. Over the past several months, I’ve become a fan of Uber and Lyft.

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Contact Center Pipeline

JANUARY 11, 2017

The last few years have brought constant change and evolution in customer expectations, technology, digital channels and how contact center leaders and solutions providers see the future of service delivery. Each year, we see new trends emerge across all areas of the business—some that become game-changers for the contact center industry, while others just seem […].

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Steve DiGioia

JANUARY 9, 2017

…a tongue-and-cheek look at what customer service might be This original article was written by Steve DiGioia. Year after year we hope service and the customer experience gets better. But great service comes at a cost, a high labor cost that many businesses are not willing or able to pay. So what are their options? Technology, that’s it. Or is it? Chat Bots.

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CustomerGauge

JANUARY 12, 2017

Sage Group Plc Is Customer-Obsessed Sage Group, a British multinational enterprise software company closed the year 2016 with excellent business results. In November, CEO Stephen Kelly published a press release, which highlighted Sage’s achievements throughout the year and the company’s customer-centric goals for 2017. Results show that Sage’s contract renewal rates grew by 2 percentage […].

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ShepHyken

JANUARY 13, 2017

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post my colleague, Bryan Peterson, shares signs that may indicate it’s time to outsource your customer service. Outsourcing can be a viable alternative and it must be something your customers trust and have confidence in. – Shep Hyken. Managing a business can be quite demanding, especially when that business is growing at a rate faster than you can keep up with.

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Speaker: Nicholas Zeisler, CX Strategist & Fractional CXO

The first step in a successful Customer Experience endeavor (or for that matter, any business proposition) is to find out what’s wrong. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it! 💡 That’s where the Voice of the Customer (VoC) comes in. Today, far too many brands do VoC simply because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do; that’s what all their competitors do.

Customer Experience

Contact Center Pipeline

JANUARY 10, 2017

Top-tier contact centers prepare for the future. It is one of the key ingredients to their performance success. They will be the first to tell you that they are not always right, and can point to many instances where the future brought a surprise or two. But by considering all of the possibilities, they are […].

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aircall

JANUARY 11, 2017

Due to becoming more mobile and more tech-savvy, customers have increasingly high standards when it comes to customer service. The emergence of customer self-service is a reflection of an evolution of customer expectations. Speedy service ranks high amongst these expectations: in a survey by Interactive Intelligence Group, “short response times” ranked higher in importance for customers than “efficiency”, “knowledgeable agents”, and even “professionalism”.

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Kayako

JANUARY 12, 2017

Narrowing down to a handful of posts to round up a year is tough. It’s easy to rush into 2017 without appreciating the good parts of 2016: there is now a lot of great content out there that supports you, the customer advocating superhero! There’s been a lot of development around the customer support world this past year with more blogs, conferences, podcasts and consultancies popping up everywhere.

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Influitive

JANUARY 12, 2017

Customer marketing is on the rise. According to Koyne Marketing’s 2017 State of Customer Marketing Report, 93% of organizations agree that customer marketing is important or very important to their revenue, and more than two-thirds are planning to boost their investment in customer marketing over the next year. In spite of this, many organizations still.

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Uncover the complexity behind call labeling and blocking with this infographic. Discover the intricate factors and entities that shape the fate of a call, from illegal activity to user feedback, and understand why numbers get labeled and blocked.

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ForeSee

JANUARY 12, 2017

While we’ve been hard at work developing the new ForeSee CX Suite, we’ve also expanded our Professional Services organization. And today we’re pleased to announce that Justin Mason has joined. The post ForeSee taps Ironman Justin Mason to lead Professional Services appeared first on ForeSee.

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Olympia Consulting

JANUARY 12, 2017

Do you work for an organization where everyone is perfect and mistakes are never made? I didn’t think so. As long as people are responsible for delivering products or services, there will be mistakes. How you handle those mistakes says volumes about the level of customer service you offer and the length of time your … The post Recover Right! appeared first on Olympia Consulting.

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ijgolding

JANUARY 10, 2017

Every January in the UK, the business media tend to get rather excited. Whilst on occasion their excitement is slightly macabre, it is driven by their fascination and obsession with the reporting of retail trading results from the critical festive period during the last three months of the previous year. I may be paying a disservice to experienced journalists and commentators, but it is difficult to tell if they really are more excited by failure and doom, than they are disappointed by success a

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GetFeedback

JANUARY 12, 2017

It's a simple question that can tell you a lot about your customers and your business. Net Promoter Score is the customer service metric to track today.

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Advertiser: ZoomInfo

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

Technology

ForeSee

JANUARY 9, 2017

Over 140 million people in the U.S. are subscribers of Verizon Wireless, the nation’s largest wireless carrier. With those sorts of numbers, listening to its customers is a necessity for. The post VOC Leaders: For Verizon Wireless, CX data is instrumental to ‘getting it right’ (video) appeared first on ForeSee.

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Wireless 71

Vonage

JANUARY 11, 2017

There’s a natural tendency for human beings to grow accustomed to any condition–positive or negative–over time. This is called the psychological principle of “hedonic adaptation.” . As a positive force, hedonic adaptation is a very good thing if you lose a job (or even a leg); it helps you to accept and ultimately adapt to your new situation. As a negative force, it’s to blame for such consequences as the fabled seven year itch, and the fact that catchy new songs become irritating not-so-new

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aircall

JANUARY 13, 2017

Bad customer service habits can take many forms. Once you’ve recognized that your customer service strategy could use some work, the next step is figuring out which steps to take. Read on to learn how to pinpoint areas of improvement, and how to switch out bad customer service habits for good ones. Lose the bad customer service attitude. The first step to remediating bad customer service is to take a critical look at your current methods and setup.

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Eptica

JANUARY 12, 2017

Date: Thursday, January 12, 2017 What were the top customer service trends of 2016? Published on: January 12, 2017. Author: Pauline Ashenden As we move into 2017, now is a good time to review last year and use the insight to plan for the future. What were the big trends and how will they evolve moving forward? To help we’ve analyzed all 100+ posts published on the Eptica blog in 2016, and picked a top ten, based on a combination of readership and industry feedback. 1.

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Over the next 12 months, what do you think will have the biggest impact on your CX automation efforts? When asked the same question, only 10% of CX leaders surveyed by Verint chose telephony. It’s no longer the engagement channel leading CCaaS conversations. The customer engagement challenges facing organizations have changed – so a new approach is needed.

Self service

McorpCX

JANUARY 9, 2017

For the last several years, improving customer experience has been rightfully viewed as one of the most important things any organization can do to drive value. In fact, the phrase is used with the same reverence (and lack of clarity) as words like “strategy,” “brand” and “innovation.”.

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CX Journey

JANUARY 11, 2017

I originally wrote this post for CXpert. It appeared on their blog in August, 2016. I'm often asked about the future of customer experience: What does it look like? What will companies focus on this year? What advancements have we seen or should we expect to see? What are the latest tools to help companies improve the experience? For this post, it's the latter I'll address.

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ForeSee

JANUARY 13, 2017

The NRF BIG Show is one of the largest retail industry events of the year, so it’s hardly surprising that there will be no shortage of things vying for your. The post Going to NRF? 3 reasons you’ll want to visit ForeSee’s booth appeared first on ForeSee.

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PeopleMetrics

JANUARY 13, 2017

When you are selling a SaaS product, you really need to think about what you’re actually selling. At PeopleMetrics we realize that we’re not only selling software, we’re selling a service. It seems like an obvious truth (after all, they are called Software-as-a-Service products), but many SaaS companies lose sight of the service side of things - they strive toward the goal of a no-touch sales organization.

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Speaker: Steve Pappas, Chief Strategist, Startup and Early Stage Growth Advisor, Keynote Speaker, CX Podcaster

As businesses strive for success in an increasingly digitized world, delivering an exceptional customer experience has become paramount. To meet this demand, enterprises are embracing innovative approaches that captivate customers and fuel their loyalty. 💥 Enter conversational AI - an absolute game-changer (if done right) in redefining CX norms.

Contact Center

Amity

JANUARY 9, 2017

As a strategist at a content marketing agency, I focused on executing client deliverables. As a CSM at a SaaS company, I focus on delivering a cohesive client experience. The biggest discrepancy between these two roles is that agencies create one-time, ad-hoc contracts which result in “fires” — i.e., something unexpectedly needs to get done immediately.

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Topdown

JANUARY 13, 2017

As the digital experience technology landscape continues to expand at an astonishing (and overwhelming) rate, companies are struggling to make the right technology purchase decisions for both customers and the company alike. Even when you buy a big DX platform with dozens of applications included under one umbrella, those applications tend to be poorly integrated with each other, and there are still gaps in the platform you have to fill with other vendors’ applications (like customer communicati

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Robert Davis

JANUARY 12, 2017

By Vicky Egan , RCDA Senior Consultant. Is attrition killing your contact center performance? An empty seat impacts the entire company. The productivity of the call center will decline, it will impact customer service metrics, service levels will take a hit, and it will affect other KPIs because the team will be handing the same volume of calls with one less team member.

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